I wanted to take the opportunity in this post to share with you some of the thoughts and ideas put forward by the working groups on the recent High Tech Future Skills event on May 3 2017, and to give you a feel for the next steps before our Skills West day on July 6.

At the very heart of the Skills West project is the drive to bring the business and education communities closer together. It is an ethos that ensures that when we engage, there is a close connection between us helping to address the real high-tech sector skills challenges business faces across the region. It is an even more powerful process when we can bring education and businesses together face to face, and help provide support to find solutions to often difficult and longstanding skills and recruitment issues.

Skills West ‘Future Skills’ events are designed to do exactly that, and last month we ran an event at FutureSpace bringing together high-tech businesses, education providers and community organisations to start a process of skills action planning – ensuring we find tangible solutions that can make a positive difference.The two major themes selected from our latest High Tech skills report 2017 were ‘diversity in high tech’ and ‘increasing the uptake of higher apprentices within the industry’ -  themes which we felt would allow us to propose achievable actions for the short, medium and long term.

High Tech Immersion Event - May 2017

Thom Leggett from Oracle opened our discussions on diversity with a reflective look at why it matters to industry and some of the deeper issues that can arise as a result - before groups then took to exploring their own experiences of diversity and recruitment.

A major discussion theme that kept emerging was the importance of engagement with young people and schools at an early stage. Thoughts centred around the need to increase the visibility of the high tech sector to young children, to help make that connection and show the incredible opportunities that high tech careers can offer all. It was suggested that this could be through ideas such as ‘industry talks’ directly to children and students in primary and secondary schools, or perhaps businesses directly supporting some continuing professional development for teachers. Many colleagues certainly voiced a need to engage more broadly and directly with careers services and the important role that they can play in promoting high tech to all. Having role models that can champion and provide a greater understanding of the sector was also considered vital to support careers guidance. 

Recruitment practices in industry also became a focus for attention within diversity, especially around how businesses could improve the presentation of job roles to encourage a greater number of applications from the wider community. This might involve having a clear diversity policy or statement operating at the heart of the business or for larger organisations more targeted and specific recruitment days to encourage wider applications. There was also a view that the job role characteristics itself could be looked at to encourage diversity, perhaps exploring flexible working arrangements or offering positions as job shares where possible.

As we moved onto our second theme on increasing the take up of higher apprenticeships, we were really taken by hearing the first hand experiences from Capgemini on their higher apprenticeship support - included some really engaging insight from one of their current degree apprentices Matt Bennett, as he explained the impact working and studying had made to both himself and the business.

It was interesting to see that as with diversity issues, discussion moved quickly to the importance of building bridges and sharing knowledge with careers services; the idea that greater take up of higher apprenticeships both by learners and businesses is about raising awareness of the benefits that could be brought to the workplace. It was certainly noted by businesses in the discussions that the lifting of the requirement for apprenticeships being restricted to 16-25 year olds has not been well communicated, and the option for business to work with older apprenticeships could possibly see a greater uptake.

The end of the event was a chance for the education providers who attended including the colleges and universities to sit down and reflect on the conversations to see what actions could be taken forward. 

In the next post we will share with you the action planning ideas that have resulted from the day where we can also let you know our plans on how we will be taking these ideas forward.